The 6 Best New Novels in February

Just in time for Valentine’s Day: Winter’s best novels are all about love and obsession.

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Photo: Courtesy of Harper Collins

Tessa Hadley’s The Past (Harper)
No one writes family like Hadley, whose follow-up to Clever Girl involves a big English house in the countryside, plenty of sibling awkwardness—a sister who overhears her brother having sex; an ill-fated pass involving a fine-boned sister-in-law—and a marvelously self-dramatizing adolescent named Ivy. Bonus: a very big secret held by the previous generation.

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Photo: Courtesy of Lee Boudreaux Books

Belinda McKeon’s Tender (Lee Boudreaux)
1990s Dublin was still a very conservative place, McKeon’s pitch-perfect second novel reminds us, and her story of a passionate, defining friendship between an aspiring poet and the charismatic photographer’s assistant that turns savagely proprietary has the ring of painful truth about it.

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Photo: Courtesy of Random House

Ethan Canin’s A Doubter’s Almanac (Random House)
In one of several major novels about the impact of mental illness on a family coming this spring, Canin’s hugely anticipated tale of male genius and its destructive power is a fine-grained portrait of a troubled mathematician and the emotional footprint he leaves behind.

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Photo: Courtesy of Little, Brown and Company

Idra Novey’s Ways to Disappear (Little, Brown)
The poet’s debut novel centers around a famous Brazilian author who disappears—she climbed into an almond tree with a cigar and hasn’t been seen since. A sleek farce about literary appropriation involving a young American translator, the author’s sexy son, and a loan shark out for blood ensues.

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Photo: Courtesy of Pantheon

Peter Behrens’s Carry Me (Pantheon)
The author’s follow-up to The O’Briens is another meditation on history and destiny: the story of two couples and two generations, told in letters and set pieces—a baron’s estate on the Isle of Wight in 1908; an escape from Berlin’s Adlon Hotel in 1938—that make the past feel stunningly close at hand.

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Photo: Courtesy of G.P. Pitman’s Sons

Theresa Rebeck’s I’m Glad About You (Putnam)
The dramatist’s unputdownable second novel pairs the competing fates of two former lovers—a starlet ambivalent about her success (casting couch, roles Chekhov would never have imagined) and a high-minded Midwestern pediatrician estranged from his own children—both defined by their inability to forget the other.